GumGum this week announced GumGum Sports Media, a suite of advertising products that converts live sports viewership and on-screen sponsorship exposure into audiences brands can target across digital channels. The launch, dated September 9, 2026, is built on measurement data from Relo Metrics, a division of GumGum, and household viewership audiences supplied by VideoAmp, a media performance platform.

In Short

A company found a way to figure out which fans actually saw a sponsor's logo on screen during a live game, and then lets that sponsor show those same people digital ads afterward. It matters because brands spend billions on sports sponsorships but have rarely been able to prove anyone noticed the logo, let alone reach those viewers again. If you buy sports sponsorships, the pitch is that you can now follow up with the households that were watching instead of guessing.

What the suite does

The product addresses a problem that has followed sports sponsorship for years: a brand pays for its logo to appear on a jersey, a courtside board, or a broadcast overlay, and then has no reliable way to confirm which viewers saw it or to reach them afterward. According to GumGum, Relo Metrics identifies exactly when sponsorship exposures occur during a live broadcast, VideoAmp builds audiences of the viewers exposed to that brand at a household level, and GumGum Sports Media turns the match between the two into an addressable, targetable audience.

The company frames the distinction plainly. Knowing that someone tuned into a game is not the same as knowing they saw a particular brand. GumGum states that its suite is the first offering to turn that verified exposure into an audience brands can activate across digital media.

Three targeting products sit inside the suite, each aimed at a different sponsorship scenario. Replay re-engages the exact fans verified to have seen a brand's placement during a live broadcast, serving them digital ads when, according to the company, they are most primed to act. Counterplay turns a rival's sponsorship into an opening, letting a brand reach fans verified to have seen a competitor's logo during a live event. Sports Audiences taps VideoAmp viewership audiences through that firm's VXA solution to reach verified fans of the sports and leagues that matter most to a brand, assembling audiences from what fans actually watched rather than from modeled interests or inferred fandom.

Where it runs and what it covers

GumGum Sports Media is available in the United States across web, connected television, and online video. According to GumGum, the coverage spans the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, NWSL, F1, and NCAA Football. League, team, and athlete sponsors looking to extend their investments can activate through the suite, as can non-sponsor brands seeking to reach sports fans without holding a formal sponsorship.

The activation surfaces matter for how the audiences get used. Connected television, or CTV, is the fastest-growing segment of television advertising, and placing verified sports viewers into that environment lets a sponsor follow a fan from a linear broadcast into streaming inventory. Online video and open web extend the same audience further into digital campaigns.

The technology underneath

Relo Metrics has measured sports marketing and sponsorship value for close to a decade using the same computer vision technology that GumGum was built on. According to Dylan Cox, Vice President, Data Strategy and Operations at Relo Metrics, the company can now use its sponsorship measurement data "to help leagues, teams, sports sponsors, and beyond reach verified fans as they continue their digital journeys beyond the sporting event itself."

That measurement layer detects branded exposures inside a broadcast: logo prominence, screen share, duration, and placement. VideoAmp supplies the household side. According to the company, VideoAmp's role is to create the audiences of viewers who were actually exposed, resolving broadcast exposure to households rather than to devices or demographic estimates.

The join between exposure and household is where the addressability comes from. An audience is only as useful as the share of it a buyer can identify and serve, a limit the industry describes as addressable reach. By pairing verified exposure with household-level viewership, GumGum Sports Media aims to raise the portion of a sponsorship's viewers that a brand can subsequently target.

Danielle Zazula, SVP of Revenue at VideoAmp, situated the launch against how sponsorship budgets have been justified. According to Zazula, brands "spend billions on sports sponsorships and have largely had to defend that spend with proxies instead of proof," and by uniting Relo's exposure data with VideoAmp's household insights, the companies "bridge linear visibility and digital execution, transforming passive broadcast logo views into actionable audiences."

Hailey Denenberg, SVP, Head of Strategy and Business Operations at GumGum, described the gap the suite is meant to close. According to Denenberg, most brands pay to be present during a game but few can capitalize on that investment by re-engaging the audience afterward. The new suite, she said, connects "what appeared on screen to the households that were actually watching, and turn that into an audience they can reach."

Context: a measurement problem the industry keeps returning to

The launch lands in a market that has spent 2026 debating how sports audiences get counted and how sponsorship value gets proven. The measurement question is not incidental to the product. It is the reason the product exists.

Sports sponsorship spending has grown steadily, and the scale of that spend is what has made the proof gap uncomfortable. When GumGum first combined its advertising platform with Relo Metrics into an integrated sports marketing solution, it cited projected brand spending of $67.56 billion on sports sponsorships in 2024 as evidence of demand for comprehensive measurement. That October 2024 move merged Relo's near-real-time sponsorship analytics with GumGum's contextual advertising platform, spanning pre-event, live, and post-event periods. GumGum Sports Media extends that logic from measurement into activation, taking the exposure data Relo already produced and turning it into audiences rather than reports.

The gap between claiming sponsorship value and proving it has drawn scrutiny from measurement bodies. The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement argued in an August 2026 paper that sports audience measurement has stopped being a reporting function and started behaving like market infrastructure, identifying nine persistent measurement challenges. That paper named computer vision and logo recognition, with vendors including Relo Metrics, as the technologies changing how logo prominence, exposure duration, and screen share get measured. GumGum Sports Media is a commercial expression of exactly that shift.

VideoAmp's presence in the suite reflects its wider positioning as a cross-platform measurement supplier. The company signed a multi-year measurement deal with Warner Bros. Discovery in July 2025 covering the StreamX project, and expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services the same month to deliver measurement inside AWS Clean Rooms. Household-level resolution of the kind GumGum Sports Media depends on typically runs through a governed clean roomenvironment, where a brand's records and a media owner's exposure logs can be matched without either side exposing raw data.

The move to attach live broadcast exposure to downstream digital targeting also has parallels among broadcasters. NBCUniversal unveiled live sports advertising tools in December 2025 that measure real-time return on investment, built with measurement partners including VideoAmp and designed to track engagement from live events through subsequent platform interactions. The common thread across these efforts is the attempt to convert linear viewing into something buyers can act on with digital precision.

GumGum itself has been widening the products built on its contextual foundation. The company launched an agent in July 2026 that converts an uploaded brief into custom targeting on The Trade Desk, part of a run of releases extending its Mindset Graph data engine into new buying workflows. Sports Media applies the same underlying computer vision that powers GumGum's contextual business to a specific, high-spend category.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For sponsors, the practical shift is from proxy to follow-up. A brand that pays for courtside signage or a broadcast overlay has historically measured that placement with modeled reach estimates and gross rating points, then run separate digital campaigns against demographic segments that may or may not overlap with the people who watched. GumGum Sports Media proposes to close that loop by making the watching households themselves the target. Whether the audiences scale usefully will depend on the size of the verified-exposure pools each broadcast produces, a figure the announcement does not quantify.

The Counterplay product introduces a competitive dimension that sponsorship measurement has rarely offered. A brand without a sponsorship can, according to the company, reach fans verified to have seen a competitor's logo, which reframes a rival's sponsorship spend as an addressable audience for the non-sponsor. That capability could affect how brands weigh the value of an official sponsorship against the cost of targeting a competitor's exposed viewers directly.

For measurement vendors and broadcasters, the launch is another data point in the consolidation of sponsorship measurement and audience activation into a single commercial stack. The industry spent much of 2026 contending with unreconciled viewer counts across linear, streaming, and open web, and with sponsorship figures that buyers had no route to audit. A product that pairs an independent exposure measurement layer with a household audience layer answers part of that demand, though the underlying numbers still originate with commercial vendors that have an interest in them.

The announcement does not include performance figures, campaign results, or pricing. It also does not specify the size of the addressable audiences the suite can generate per league or per broadcast, which leaves the central scale question open. Those details will determine how the suite performs against the proof standard its own launch invokes.

Timeline

Summary

Who: GumGum, The Mindset Company, working with its Relo Metrics division and the media performance platform VideoAmp.

What: The launch of GumGum Sports Media, a suite of three targeting products (Replay, Counterplay, and Sports Audiences) that converts verified on-screen sponsorship exposure and live sports viewership into addressable, targetable digital audiences.

When: Announced September 9, 2026.

Where: Available in the United States across web, connected television, and online video, covering the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, NWSL, F1, and NCAA Football.

Why: Sports sponsors have spent heavily to place brands during live events but have lacked a reliable way to confirm which viewers saw a placement or to reach them afterward, relying on proxies rather than proof; the suite pairs Relo's exposure measurement with VideoAmp's household viewership to close that gap and turn broadcast logo views into audiences brands can activate digitally.